Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters are five variants of
URL parameters used by marketers to track the effectiveness of online
marketing campaign
Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to empha ...
s across traffic sources and publishing media. They were introduced by
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin.
As o ...
' predecessor
Urchin and, consequently, are supported
out-of-the-box by Google Analytics. The UTM parameters in a URL identify the campaign that refers traffic to a specific website,
and attributes the browser's
website session and the sessions after that until the campaign attribution window expires to it. The parameters can be parsed by analytics tools and used to populate reports.
This example URL has four of the five UTM parameters highlighted:
:
https://www.example.com/page?utm_content=buffercf3b2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=snapchat.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Use
UTM parameters in a URL identify the marketing campaign that refers traffic to a specific website.
To define and append the relevant UTM parameters to the appropriate URLs, marketers routinely use simple,
spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in cel ...
-based, or automated UTM builder tools,
including the Google Analytics URL Builder for websites.
When a
hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text wit ...
contains a URL with UTM parameters, the web analytics software of the destination website interprets the parameter information and attributes it to the browser's
website session and the sessions after that until the campaign attribution window has expired (by default, six months in Google Analytics).
Use UTM parameters in Wordpress
Rankmath. Retrieved 12 April 2022.
Metrics
UTM parameters that are passed to URLs can be parsed by analytics tools such as Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin.
As o ...
and Adobe Analytics, with the data used to populate standard and custom analytics reports.
UTM parameters
There are five different UTM parameters, which may be used in any order:
See also
*
* Social media analytics
Social media analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing data from social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter. A part of social media analytics is called social media monitoring or social listening. It is commonly ...
References
Web analytics
Web log analysis software
URL
Google
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